I am the owner of threeraid readyresto druids, each of varying gear levels. One who is almost full BiS and raids progression 25 man raids. One who is in a mix of LFR and normal mode gear and putzes around in a one day/3 hour a week 10 man alt group that just started toying with heroics. And lastly one who is a mix of BoE, VP and LFR gear, whose raiding pretty much extends to one LFR per week. One of the most rewarding things to come out of all of these druids is that I get to experience raiding in different raid formats, and at different stages of gearing. This helps me to better understand the different struggles and limitations that druids experience in more diverse settings than my main raid, which helps me better understand is happening at different levels of play. However, one of the side effects of this is that I also have the opportunity to observe my own faults along the way as well.

This post is going to talk a little bit about my experiences with the latter.

I pretty commonly log every raid that I participate in, be it a PuG BH or a LFR experience, so that I can take a look at how I did and analyze my play to look for areas of improvement. Earlier this week, I did the back half of LFR in an attempt to acquire any of the following: A helm (for the LOVE OF GOD, could I please get a meta gem already?!), an off hand or a Maw. When I finished, I perused through my logs, and noted that I had fairly exceptional uptimes on LB and strong uptime with Harmony for each of the four encounters that I participated in that night. Which, in turn, got me to wondering if I was as cognizant of these things when I was raiding on Beru. So I took a look and here is what I found:

Aryas – LFR Warmaster Blackhorn

Beru – Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn

While I did a respectable job with maintaining both of these buffs on Beru, I did better with Aryas. And the parses I used for Beru in this post were from last night while I was making a more concerted effort to be diligent about these buffs in light of my Tuesday revelations (I’m not entirely sure how successful I was with that). What you see above was pretty consistently the case for all four of the encounters in the zone. I was better at monitoring my buffs with Aryas, than with Beru.

I needed to figure out why.

My first instinct was to tell myself it was because Hard Modes have so many additional things going on, that it was only natural that I would have slightly lower uptimes. But after a few seconds, I had to dismiss that as bullshit. I mean, yes, there are some additional mechanics and hectic healing that occur that might cause me to have slightly lower uptimes, but if I’m being really honest that isn’t the crux of it. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the truth of the matter is that I’m a little more lazy on Beru because I can be.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m hyper-competitive on any character that I’m playing and I’m going to bust my ass to perform well regardless. However, it dawned on me that the reason that I’m so diligent with Aryas is because I have to be. I’m behind in gear comparatively, and I don’t have a regen trinket. This means that I am extremely cognizant of doing everything I can to be competitive – which means maintaining both Lifebloom and Harmony to the best of my abilities.

Which brought me to question why I wasn’t quite as diligent with Beru. I mean, if I can do it in one raid setting, why can’t I do better at it in the other. I came to the conclusion that I think part of the reason with Beru is that I get greedy. “I’ll cast this one more rejuv” or “It can wait for SM to come off cooldown” – which, when I think about it, is a bit counter productive. As such, I realized that I need to kick myself in the ass on Beru and prioritize stepping it up with regards to these two buffs.

Message received, Mini-Me. Message received.

The other thing that I found very educational was the freedom that I have with how aggressive I can be with Rejuv on Beru. It actually took me three LFR Ultraxions on Aryas before I finished the fight without running myself dry before the end of the encounter – the problem? TOO MUCH REJUV, DUMMY! One of the luxuries of better gear is the ability to push your limits farther, and it was really hard for me (especially on that fight in particular) to reign myself back in. The problem was also exacerbated by the fact that this is the only one of my druids not running a regen trinket.

However, one of the other things I did on Tuesday night was that I went ahead and took a look at my spell breakdowns for each character. Here are the top spells from those same Blackhorn parses (which are roughly consistent for all of the encounters throughout the night).

Aryas – LFR Warmaster Blackhorn

Beru – Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn

The thing that is immediately noticeable to me is the difference between how much of my healing, comparatively, was done with Wild Growth vs. Rejuv in each parse. While I had roughly the same number of WG ticks in each parse, I had significantly fewer RJ ticks on Aryas. And…this is a good thing! I was actually kind of happy with myself regarding this, as I ran myself dry on every encounter we did – but I made it to the end of the fight with my mana pool, which had not always been the case on some of the earlier forays into LFR. However, I do question if I can’t get those RJ and WG numbers to balance out a little closer on Aryas, as that is where treecalcs tells me they should be – and I do think that a regen trinket would help me in achieving that goal.

Regardless, the lesson learned here was that Rejuv is a luxury that not everyone has and it is important to play smartly and find a good balance for utilizing it at all gear levels, and that balance will continue to change as you improve your character. So, thank you mini-me, for humbling me and reminding me that sometimes I have to take a step back in order to take a step forward.

In all honesty, having a mini-me has taught me so many things about my class that this one post isn’t anywhere near enough to elaborate on all of them. But I would encourage anyone who is getting bored with their class, or even just with the game as a whole, to take on the project of creating a mini-me and experiencing things from the fresh perspective of player just starting out. You’d be surprised how much you learn, and just how much you take for granted.

One response to “Things My Mini-Me Has Taught Me”

Totally agree – haven’t got a clue about all the druid stuff you just said, but I have a mini me (holy priest) and I always learn things from playing at a lower gear level. I am thinking of leveling another priest come MoP (baby panda priest maybe?), just because I like to see now and then how the leveling experience for a holy/shadow priest has changed (again). I just like to know what new priests are experiencing :)

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If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru